Subtle Bodies Page 7

  “I don’t either,” she said, holding a hand up and making a wiping motion. “No it’s just now. A little. You understand.”

  Everybody around them had smoked in the seventies, at college. Against Sameness! could have been their group’s motto. And probably that sentiment as much as Douglas’s idiosyncratic interest in alternative medical notions had been behind the pressure to get them all to quit. Plainly Elliot had relapsed. One of Douglas’s more convincing faxes explained the handful of almonds Ned tried to remember to eat each day.

  Ned said, “There’s lung cancer on both sides of my family. It was a gift, when I quit. I was smoking Kools at the time and Douglas had a medical photograph of the lungs of a menthol cigarette smoker, and that worked for me.”

  “I like Marlboros,” she said. He could barely hear her.

  Mist had flowed into the gorge and stalled there. It was beautiful. He said, “How are you doing? That’s an inevitable question and I know the answer. I’m sorry I even asked. You know how we all feel, Iva …”

  She had lifted her chin up and tilted her head back. He felt the gesture showed her trying to keep the tears in. He didn’t know what to say. He noticed that she had a fine, straight, short, horizontal dent in the upper round of her cheeks. He’d seen that in some famous face, Russian, pre-war cinema. He couldn’t think of the star’s name.

  Ned said, “I went to the ravine.” She flinched. He shouldn’t have said that. It was almost as stupid as Gruen having mentioned at breakfast his recollection that Douglas’s favorite Poe story was “The Premature Burial.”

  One of the kitchen women came in, exchanged signs with Iva, and left.

  “She will bring coffee,” Iva said.

  A big trope with Douglas had been knowing the names, and as much as seemed appropriate and practical about the servers and helpers and cleaners, the security guards, all the support workers who kept life so pleasant for the student body at NYU. He had been kind of ostentatious about it, but over time it had seemed like the right thing to do, and the working rabble, as Douglas had referred to them, seemed to appreciate it. Ned had carried this practice on in a dilute way in his life and Nina just did it by reflex. Of course Douglas had hated some of the rabble, like Pugnacio, as Douglas called Ignacio, their irascible super in the building on Second Avenue.

  Iva was speaking to him and he needed to pay attention. She said, “May I tell you what I am hoping? Thank you. You were the closest to Douglas of all …” Ned hid his surprise.

  She said, “Oh yes, you! He said so. You were the one he admired, with your work. Oh, your college group. You were interesting, all of you. But he would say it was Ned carrying on with the idea of the group.” She touched his knee. “Don’t look so strange. I’m telling you what he believed.”

  Ned felt murderous. The thinnest of threads had been thrown to him, and thinner and thinner, risible little things, risible invisible. And Douglas had never given a dime out of his fortune to Fair Trade or any of the other causes he brought to the group’s attention. At one time or another, all the others had.

  She said, “You were the closest, of course, because you both loved Claire.” Something steely came into her voice.

  Ned was shaken. He said, “I wasn’t really in close contact with Douglas, you know. Especially after … well, things happened. You know.” It was true he had loved Claire. And then he hadn’t loved her. And it was also true that whenever he’d been close to saying to Claire that maybe they should think about splitting up, she had come up with a gift for him, a getaway trip, something personal that stopped the impetus. Sometimes a confession of a trivial sort would do the trick for her.

  There was something possessed about what Iva was doing. She said, “Claire would write at times, you know. We would hear about your work. Your book, she sent it to us.”

  Now he was both enraged and astonished.

  “My book?” He knew he was sounding rigid.

  “Yes, about Mexico. The movement.”

  Ned had self-published his master’s thesis on the ejido movement in Mexico, or rather on its death-throes. It wasn’t even letterpress. It had typos. He doubted he had three copies left. It was paperback. All this had been years ago. She’d had no right to send his thesis to them.

  He couldn’t believe it. Something diabolical had gone on that he didn’t deserve.

  He said, “She wrote to you?” Immediately he regretted saying it. Because he had cut himself off from the position that he knew all about it and it was nothing, which would have left him a shred of dignity. But then probably he had done the right thing by admitting his ignorance, because the letters themselves would have declared that fact.

  “She wrote to Douglas. We have her letters. He admired you both.”

  He thought, Great, he admired us because we lived at the material level of graduate students. In the name of something. Ned was drowning in bitterness. And now he was wondering about something else, Claire’s little windfalls, little freshets of cash every now and then, things she got at thrift shops that looked too good for what she claimed she’d spent. Birthdays, cash from family members even though she was estranged from pretty much every single one of them. Don’t be inventing things, he said to himself. He had to get away from this. He got up but sat down again immediately. They weren’t through. The kitchen woman brought mugs of coffee on a tray. He was going to stop thinking of Iva’s staff people as retainers. And he had to stop being a dumb prick about people living so fucking comfortably. He had lived his life a certain way, so enough.

  Iva said, “What I want is that you tell the story of Douglas’s mind. From your school days. His ideas …

  “Others can tell about his work, about Kundera. The other things the public knows. Elliot can do that.

  “We are going to make a magnificent event to remember him. You are the ones to speak, because … I can’t, myself.”

  He was afraid that she was about to weep. She picked up her coffee and inhaled the aroma. He waited.

  She said, “I have not been a good wife to Douglas. It’s a bad story.”

  She gestured broadly, and said, “All this will be gone.”

  “What?” Ned said.

  “A foundation might take this place, that is possible.”

  Her purpose, with him—if that’s what it had been—seemed to have been accomplished. The news she had given him was like acid. The membranes between things in his mind that should be kept separate were being eaten away. He could think of a few more things he would like to know about Claire. He wouldn’t ask. He would not.

  He asked, “So did Claire stop by here on a trip, ever?”

  Iva appeared to hesitate over her answer. He hated it. Finally she said, “Oh yes, but not very often. I would say, at the most, six times she was here. And she might call from New York. She traveled.”

  Rise above this, Ned said to himself. “Yes, she did travel. Well, I’m, I have to say, surprised. Douglas dropped her. She was not a forgiving person. Of course I only know her side of it. And it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about. She made clear. Well. Jesus.”

  He saw some relaxation or satisfaction come into her expression. It wasn’t pleasant.

  This has to stop here, he thought. He had to leave.

  “I’ll do what’s necessary,” he said.

  “You’ll write it out first, for me,” she said.

  “All right,” he said. It was time to go.

  13 He had guessed high blood pressure for Gruen and he’d been correct. He put his arm around Gruen’s shoulder. They were walking to the accident site together.

  The world was wet. It was much warmer. Rags of fog drifted overhead.

  They were almost at the scene. Joris was lagging a few yards back. Ahead there was nothing to see, just the hill dropping lower and then the place it broke. The sheared-off earth that had fallen into the creek bed was being washed downstream, cut in two places by the surging waters. The Toro riding mower had been winched up out of the viscous mass
choking the creek and left to stand alone farther up the hill on the grass, like a monument. It had been draped in plastic and wrapped around haphazardly with yellow barrier tape. Ends of the tape flapped festively when the wind struck. The far bank of the creek looked normal. It was steep. Thick woodland began just behind the drop on that side. The ground abutting the catastrophe was very torn up: ordinary rubble and broken bricks and chunks of scrapwood showed in it, evidence, maybe, of the quality of the topsoil Douglas had trucked in to raise and contour the hilltop during his program of estate improvement. There were metal stakes here and there. Broad tire tracks scored what was left of the lawn near the site.

  Without warning, Gruen dropped to his knees. Ned aborted a motion to reach out after him and pull him back from the edge. It wasn’t necessary. Gruen got up, black spots on the knees of his jeans. Ned saw that he hadn’t been that close to the edge, in fact.

  “Say something,” Gruen said. He was weeping. In the group, in the past, Gruen had been everybody’s confessor. Ned knew he hadn’t been paying proper attention to Gruen, not seriously, over the years. The most you could say is that he had been keeping track of him. “Say something,” Gruen said again.

  Ned didn’t know what to say. A dry sob came out of him and he said, “Venice is sinking.” He didn’t know why.

  They seemed to know what he meant, his friends.

  14 Something called the Vale was just ahead of her. Nina thought, Don’t be insecure. She was having a new fear. It was neurotic and it was about Ned and Iva. It was shameful, but fortunately she had no shame. It was a pattern, a potential pattern, she was afraid of. She thought, There are people so physically extraordinary that if they’re for any reason willing to stay with you and be your love you take their shit forever. Claire when she became good riddance still had her perfect skin, which was perfect due to her avoidance of facial expressions. The great Douglas limited himself to great beauties. And Iva was supposed to be beautiful in an ornate Austro-Hungarian way, at least judging by the images on the net from her Prague days and more recently from the jacket of her latest children’s book Hans and the Miles Long Knockwurst or whatever the fuck she called it. So, as to Ned … Number One, her great beauty. Number Two, she was in some kind of distress, which is always attractive. And Number Three, she had a readymade offspring. She had already proven that she produced babies. On the other hand Iva was forty-three. On the other hand, she herself would hit forty before you could say God help me.

  What in the name of fuck was the Vale? It looked like an establishment that had come through a time machine with stuff clinging to it from different eras. It was built in a lovely swamp. It was the place she could get a taxi to carry her up to the castle, she’d been told, so she loved it. She toiled forward. Her next roll-on carryon would have larger wheels. That would be superior when rolling your belongings through muck.

  She was too tired. She had spent the night in Kingston in a motel from hell. She thought, I stayed in a room that was rejected by the people who made The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari because it was too scary: I’m going to tell Ned that.

  She had to get to Ned. And she had to look good.

  15 “This happened,” Gruen said. “Where you were, I don’t know. This was thirty minutes ago.”

  Ned said, “I was indisposed. Go ahead.”

  Gruen said, “Well, this happened. Outside the kitchen there’s a deck and a hatch and stairs that lead down to another deck. On the lower one you’re out of sight and private and you can enjoy the sound of the creeks the livelong day. So there Iva was on a bench and looking very shaky to me. I asked if she was all right and she stood up and asked if I was a smoker by any chance.

  “Well I am, I hate to admit. I’m way cut down, but I am. I said something about this being a time when you can be forgiven if you take a drag or two. And I told her, which was the truth, that I didn’t have any smokes on me.

  “So she said Here, I’ll give you one. I only have two. We’ll share. We’ll split and later you’ll get a pack for me when you go to the store next. Oh, and Marlboro is what I prefer but it doesn’t matter.

  “And she took a lighter out of her pants pocket and then right in front of me she pushes her hand into her cleavage and comes out with two Marlboros and gives me one. It was warm and it smelled like her. I was pretty stunned but I pretended that this was the way I always got my cigs, of course. So we lit up, tra la! I was sorry for her. She smoked the thing like a machine.”

  Ned said, “Outré,” which was not a word he’d used since 1974.

  Gruen said, “Some people are kind of magnificent. Just an observation.”

  16 Ned was running. It was downhill and steep and the road was what it was and he was trying to be careful. Nina was at the Vale, waiting for him. The message had come to the house. Elliot had gotten it. The message was that she could get a taxi but only as far as some bridge, so she was waiting for someone from the estate to come down in a car and pick her up at the store, unless that was unreasonable. When Elliot read him the message Ned turned south and began to run. He could get down to the Vale faster than he could organize the loan of a car. Also he wanted to run. Nina was insane to do this, but she was here.

  It was safer to run on the crown of the road than in the ruts or on the margin. How was she going to like all this forest primeval, so dank, so endless. She was insane.

  She was going to be a wreck, exhausted, how would she look?

  Now everything was going to be impossible, but better.

  Ned turned onto the spur path that led to the Vale’s parking area and he could see Nina there. He halted to get his breath. She had seen him and was waving as she mounted a low, broad tree stump at the edge of the lot. She began posing. The stump was a plinth for herself as a living statue representing Wrath. She put a fist on her hip and raised her other fist high in the air. The upraised fist became a claw. She was crazy. But it was going to be all right. She was letting him know he was forgiven, definitely. Yes, she was, she was letting him know. The old burgomaster was on the porch in his wheelchair. She didn’t care who saw what she was doing. There was something to be said for a little idiosyncrasy in the world. Her carryon was leaning against the stump, mud-caked.

  She looked fine. Her black hair was done up in a tall bun whose crest was visible over the crown of her head. It was unusual for her, and probably intended to make her look taller, like the heels on the cowboy boots she was wearing.

  He was close now. He could see that her eyes were done. She knew how to do makeup when she wanted to, by god. She was wearing tight new jeans and her fringed buckskin jacket, which carried a definite cowgirl reference, which was all right. The rather fierce first impression her small sharp face could give was softened by fatigue.

  He jumped up onto the stump with her and embraced her so hard they tottered for a moment.

  “I came here to kill you,” she said.

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

  “How sorry are you?”

  “So sorry, but we’re forgiving each other, right?”

  “Not yet. I’m not going to kill you, I’m going to fuck you.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “That is your punishment.”

  “I know. And I’m so sorry the way I left. My heart is shaking.”

  He was squeezing her. He was full of joy. They had to get down from there. She was pressing his crotch with the back of her hand. She did anything she wanted to. He wasn’t hard. Afloat, he felt afloat.

  “Hm,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, my dear.”

  He pulled her hand up and against his chest. He said, “Feel my heart.”

  “Feel mine,” she said, and pressed his hand against the front of her bright yellow linen shirt, his favorite.

  They had to stop this.

  He renewed his embrace in order to keep his balance.

  “Unhand my behind,” she said.

  17 They had decided to proceed by stages up to the property, pulling her
luggage and stopping to rest as much as they needed to, taking their time and talking, catching up. She’d said she loved all the trees, but described them as excessive, to make him laugh. She wasn’t above using a witticism twice if she thought he’d missed it the first time or had insufficiently appreciated it. She had no shame about it, in fact she thought doing that was funny.

  They were at the bridge. She said, “I want to tell you something so I can forget it. You can help me. I had to squeeze past a woman in the aisle on the plane and I thought she was making a face at me so I made a face back at her, just before I realized she was exophthalmic. I feel awful. I want you to make it fade from my mind. I want it to fade so completely there’s not a trace. So make it fade.”

  “I’m doing it.”

  Nina said, “Tell me when it’s completely gone.”

  They laughed.

  They were kissing again. “It’s good you didn’t wear lipstick,” he said.

  “Thinking ahead,” she said. She was neatening him up. She’d once said that makeup was advertising for your vagina and hers was taken. He’d liked that remark even if it wasn’t serious, because she was his.

  One thing he’d learned from her, that she’d learned from the burgomaster, was that there was another road, a much longer back way up the hill that avoided the torrents and was used by trucks and emergency service vehicles. And she had brought him up to date on the Convergence. There was a solid consensus that the talking points would use Invasion but not Anglo-Saxon Invasion. He’d taken the position that that was what it was going to be, literally, even if the Spaniards were brought in to put a mustache on it. It was going to be Americans, Brits, and a few Australians but no French.

  They crossed the bridge. Nina wanted to know what Douglas had meant when he said he lived in a dying forest.

  Ned said, “He was being melodramatic. There was an ash blight. The other trees were fine. And maples were the successor species, so it ended up greener than before.”